Nassim Graham's Profile

Fantastic piece. Clearly you were up against the word limit (800!) The issue of Starbucks taking down the social aspect of the website is interesting – do you think there was anything nefarious there? If the ideas were too good, would Starbucks worry that competitors also have access to the highest “rated” ideas? This brings up an interesting question around the legality of ownership of open innovation, which I would value your perspective on, given the insightful nature of this piece.

I enjoyed reading this, especially the details around valuing the diversity of thought derived from various backgrounds of people involved. Though, is there an implicit assumption that sourcing talent must come from within the United States? As a follow-up, what portion of NASA work would classify as a level of secrecy requiring US citizenship? Given that recent successes in open innovation efforts (e.g., Netflix) have often come from non-US teams, it is not hard to imagine that NASA’s success with these programs will be limited, relative to organizations that can source form the global talent pool.

“I would also suggest that Boeing considers selling the 3D printed parts they create to competitors (including Airbus) since Boeing is a leader in developing this technology and may be able to generate significant incremental revenue from sales of these components.”

While it seems clear that Boeing is a leader in this space, what do you think Airbus’s perspective might be on relaying on their largest competitor for key components? I imagine Airbus would frown upon the idea. But given Boeing’s historically low margins, and the high value add of this technology, might Boeing consider transitioning away from airplane assembly, and towards this field? Or, more realistically, spinning off the 3D mfg unit into a stand alone, independent company, to better serve Boeing’s competition?

The power of consumer shopping data pre-purchase has been huge for online retailers. Being able to see what shoppers browsed but didn’t purchase, and how they compare various products, etc. Is there a way Coca-Cola can match or emulate this type of data collection for retail? While the mobile pictures collection makes sense, it is still orders of magnitude away from what online retailers collect. Would a combination of facial recognition / customer tracking video software and brick and mortar retail partnership allow Coca-Cola to see which of their products customers consider, but don’t purchase? Given the level of investment this would require, what would have to be true / what would Coca-Cola management need to believe for this to be value accretive?

If additive manufacturing requires less labor than comparable methods, how would the rise in this technology affect global supply chains in apparel manufacturing? If we expand this idea outside apparel but to many other manufacturing industries, one could imagine a world where jobs leave traditionally low cost countries. How does this possibility affect governmental funding of these technologies?

AI in medicine naturally lends itself to personalization of health care. If wealthy members of society would pay 10X more for this level of care, would this ultimately decrease the amount of time and money spent on “generalized” health care (what we think of today as drug discovery, etc.)? And if so, does this imply a bifurcation in healthcare between the haves and the have-nots?